aerial landscape paintings

I saw three paintings by Rafal Topolewski at the ‘As Far As We Got’ exhibition at the International 3 in Manchester last Friday.

Having spent a long time looking at landscape from the air, and trying to draw the ground from a flight the particular moments and details that leap out of the view are caught in these paintings. When I’ve been writing about aerial landscapes I’ve tried to explore how the ground from the air should be thought through the body in flight. That a sense of gravity and impact are needed in order to avoid seeing views from the air as decontextualised views ‘from nowhere’ as Donna Haraway describes views from above.
These paintings remind me of that quality, of the gesture of the brush strokes in the landscape draw you in, in the same way as the eye is drawn in to details of a landscape as you fly over it.